Brain of the Artist

About this artwork

Palmer has developed a form of sculpture which involves mapping on multiple sheets of glass. Each sheet ‘maps’ a section of the brain, using information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, which the artist underwent at University College London. Brought together, the layered ‘maps’ create a 3D image which appears to float in a glass chamber, and which can only be perceived from certain angles, disappearing when the work is viewed from the side. The result is a most unusual and highly objective form of portraiture with a powerful, poignant beauty. This work is elegant, ethereal, which develops in a challenging way the concept of self-representation.

Contemporary portraiture can take many, sometimes surprising, forms. Alongside traditional likenesses in painting and sculpture, portraits are now created in every conceivable medium, including videos, installations and digital files. When the human form can be represented, for example, in a computer-generated hologram or in an image generated from a sample of DNA, the concept of reality in portraiture can now mean much more than simply recording an individual’s features and personality.

The Scottish artist Angela Palmer uses information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to re-create human, animal and plant forms as beautiful and ethereal sculptures. The work in our collection is essentially a self-portrait as it is based on a scan of the artist’s own brain. Using the detail of the scan as a starting point, Palmer engraved the contours of cross-sections of her brain onto sixteen individual sheets of glass which were then brought together to form a ghostly, three-dimensional image of her brain. The delicately engraved lines are only visible from certain angles so that as the viewer moves around the sculpture (which is shown on a plinth at head height) the image of the brain seems to vanish and then reappear. It is a compelling combina­tion of science and art. Palmer’s sculpture evokes the spirit of modern medical research but also conveys the beauty and mystery of this most vital human organ.
Palmer was born in Aberdeen in 1957. She enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art but chose instead to pursue a career in journalism. She returned later to the study of art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art in London.

The sculptural techniques which she has developed have frequently involved collaborations with scientists, and her work has included images derived from some famous sources. One of her most acclaimed pieces maps the skull of the legendary eighteenth-century racehorse Eclipse, in ink drawings on glass. In a similar process, she also used scans to create a portrait of the well-known author Robert Harris. Perhaps her most poignant explorations of this technique were her sculptures based on scans of an Egyptian mummy in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Palmer’s ink drawings on glass revealed the underlying form of an infant boy who had lain wrapped in linen for almost 2,000 years.

The human brain is probably the most complex living structure in the world. As well as storing vast quantities of information and controlling innumer­able functions, it shapes who we are as individual human beings, with all our thoughts, hopes and beliefs. Brain of the Artist reduces this incredible capacity into a simple, elegant form yet it also encourages us to contemplate the enormous power of this small mass of tissue. In spite of the scientific objectivity of its source, this is an extremely intimate work of art. As the artist observes: ‘It is an extraordinary experience, staring at your brain floating in a glass chamber before you. Unlike traditional portraiture, an image of one’s brain does not depict anything recognis­ably “you” and yet it could not be more intensely personal.’

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.

Permanent

The Modern Portrait

Angela Palmer

Angela Palmer

Born in Aberdeen in 1957, Palmer had a distinguished career in journalism before studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art in London from 2002-7. Palmer developed her sculptural technique while studying anatomy at the Ruskin School and has…